Help! I am a special ed teacher and I have a 17yr old student who wants to learn 3D graphic design. However, he has Cerebral Palsy (average intelligence) and has limited ways to access the computer. Currently he uses an infrared system (a dot on his head) for a curser and a button for the mouse click. Because of this he cannot use hotkeys in blender. Is there a way he can use it without hotkeys? Any ideas/suggestions on how I can help him do this independently?

For mac: Go to Settings->Language&Text - enable Keyboard & Character Viewer and check the box "Show ..." in the lower right. After that a new icon appears in the upper right menubar on your screen. You can enable the on-screen keyboard there.

Sure, this will end up in a slow workflow within Blender, but he could use all it's functions independently as you wished.

Blender provides a lot of buttons / menu entries in the UI to perform the same operators as with hotkeys - they are mostly just shortcuts. There is also the spacebar menu, but that wouldn't also require a screen keyboard to enter search phrases.

Since most parts of the UI are py-written, one could add missing / often used operators to the existing panels / menus, to make them easily available for that dot + button input device combination.

Is there some problem with simply using the menus and buttons in Blender's user interface? Originally, Blender relied heavily on hotkeys since they are so much faster, but there was a determined campaign to get everything into the UI.

P.S. please don't cross post the same message to different threads. It only breaks up the discussion and gives the admins something else to delete.